Aiden, who is currently obsessed with seeing his own name in print, is tickled by the new Mabel’s Labels on some of his belongings. We bought a Basic Kit with a variety of tags and stickers to put on items that may go with Aiden to preschool. The labels are fantastic!
We have run the Skinny Mini labels through the dishwasher without any fading or peeling. Can’t wait to get more of these – particularly around Christmas!
I’m trying to cherish the very last of the baby words that Aiden has left. Some of them are just too adorable not to enjoy. My favourite baby word is “heckacarpet” for “helicopter”, close behind “walkaroni” for “macaroni”, so I captured it on video before it disappeared completely:
I haven’t made any effort to correct how Aiden says helicopter. For the most part, he self-corrects on his pronunciation. In some cases, he chooses to stick to his baby words for unknown reasons: “baa baa” for sheep or “manana” for banana. I know for sure he can say both words correctly, and yet they remain baby words.
Did you have favourite baby words?
Aiden has developed a comedic personality. Sometimes he’ll fib on something, of example, saying a cow says “meow” just to get a laugh. He even has a fake laugh when he wants to show that something is funny. One thing I find truly funny is his new desire to have us repeat words or phrases…
“Mommy say that: spout!” or “Mommy say that: woman on a red motorcycle.”
I’m not sure where this comes from. Perhaps it comes from us trying to teach Aiden new and complex words (“Can you say that?”) or perhaps it comes from Dora the Explorer when Dora or Boots yell “Say map! Say map!”.
Whatever it is, it’s quite funny. Weird. But funny.
For Christmas, Santa gave Aiden his very first board game: the I Can Do That Games Curious George – Discovery Beach. The premise of the game is to find hidden treasures. You select cards, look under the panels, and find the matching objects. You shake up the box so that the items always move about to different places on the board or become buried / unburied in the sand.
We don’t follow the rules of the game yet: we let Aiden look under all the panels, not using the spinning wheel, and we don’t collect cards we’ve ‘won’. So far, we lay out several cards for Aiden and he chooses one to look for – he will pull up panels until he finds what’s on his card, though sometimes we have to shake up the box again.
Aiden has a lot of fun playing this game. He loves looking for the cards that are more open ended, “any brown” or “any shell”, and cheers whenever he finds a matching item. He’ll happily sit and play this game with us for a solid half hour.
Aiden loves to read. Without being diverted, I’m pretty sure he’d spend his entire day reading (or rather, being read to). Even at Strong Start, he’ll ask to sit down and read with me several times during the morning and will read until I shoo him away to play. I have many personal conflicts in stopping his reading, which feels like discouraging his interest, but there really is only so much time you can spend reading.
With that in mind, you can imagine that we have a LOT of favourite books. I buy a lot of books for Aiden, particularly at big library book sales. If we go to the library, we would spend a week sitting on the couch reading those books after, so I tend not to take out as many books as you’d expect. Still, our library is quite impressive.
These are some of Aiden’s favourite books at age 2:
Aiden doesn’t read any of his board books anymore, nor does he enjoy the ‘first word’ type books, in general. They were big for a long time. He prefers books with stories or with lots of pictures that can be extensively examined. He has little patience for books by Dr. Seuss, though he will happily sit through Winnie-the-Pooh. From time-to-time he will go back to Mother Goose rhymes (we have many compilations).
I try to rotate books around every 3 months or so, moving books from Aiden’s room to his shelf downstairs and reorganizing his shelf in his room. I try to bring other books to his attention, but he often has favourites that he’ll return to. He’s most likely to explore a new book if it’s in his play area, though if he doesn’t like a book, he’ll stop asking for it very quickly.
What books do your kids like at age 2?